Palm Hires Ex-Nokia Meego Chief Ari Jaaski

After a very large number of Palm employees headed to Nokia to work on Meego, perhaps its only fitting that somebody from Nokia heads to Palm. So reports John Paczkowski of All Things D, who writes that that Nokia's head of the Meego division, Ari Jaaski, will move to the bay area and become the new Senior Vice President of webOS for Palm / HP.

Paczkowski also notes that Palm is pulling in Victoria Coleman from Samsung R&D to oversee platform and app development as well as a few execs from within HP to run product marketing, sales organization, and product management.

Back to Jaaski, we don't know much about him (yet), but the most linked piece on his blog happens to be this PDF white paper on "Building consumer products with open source" where he describes the basic work behind creating the Maemo OS for Nokia tablets (the precusor to Maemo). In it, he brings up many points that should get developers (and lovers of open source) excited, including sponsoring the development of existing open source projects, hiring open source developers, and jointly developing code with the open source community. Some of our faves: "it is very beneficial to use open source in consumer product creation," "Licensing is simpler with open source," and, "we can combine open communication and product confidentiality."

I used to use a Palm Pre a lot. What a great device. What an astounding software. I was so disappointed to see it not getting the traction it deserves. I really hope that now that it has found a new home @ HP it will rise again! And by the way, I have an extra sweet spot for Pre. It shares a lot of stuff with Maemo and N900.